Hacking the Galaxy (How Will You Break The Universe)
by dzha4225
Summary: A strange virus turned every Human on Earth into their player character of their favorite video game. How bad they will be able to break the galaxy? (Rated M for unexpected violence and foul language against the fourth wall. A prototype for a will-be wide open sandbox about neural networks and programming.)
1. Chapter 1

Nobody knew where it started, or what's it's purpose. It just happened that when everyone who were hardcore enough video-game players woke up as their most played game-character, and the outside was filled with bloodthirsty Monsters and Mutants. And they knew something went wrong have happened. Some sees it as a blessing, some sees it as a curse as it is indeed the result of a kind of virus being released from somewhere. But all they knew was the fact that they HAVE to fight to survive in the AWESOMEpocalypse that used to be the Earth.

**1 Jan 2020**

Some sort of Infection have been broke out in Seoul, Korea. The nature of the Infection was largely unknown, but reports said that they have saw "Zombies" in the Infected zone.

**5 Jan 2020**

The Korean army and WHO have all but failed to stop the Infection-hygiene measures did nothing to slow it's spread, the Pathogen survive all kind of efforts trying to eradicate it. The Infection spread through air, water, contact and all kind of possible routes, crossing closed borders and ignoring all manners of measures that attempted to contain it. The survivors within the first Infection woke up as their game characters in their favorite games, and found out that most of the basic skills of said characters could be used without problem.

**15 Jan 2020**

North Korea was now completely enveloped in Infected and Dead-the lack of any kind of entertainment means that the unstoppable Infection did not choose or transform anyone, killing every single living organism that used to inhabit North Korea, including their entire ruling complex.

**20 Jan 2020**

The Infection have crossed it's borders into Japan and Mainland China. Tokyo started to look like an AnimeCon event, except the obviously "physically Impossible" stunts and powers that starts to pop out everywhere there was a fight against the Monsters and Mutants what now roams both countries. Mainland China have also seen a large outflow of crazily powerful Individuals-thanks to certain Internet Games that was popular there.

Players have noticed that they can assimilate the abilities of anything they kill by collecting something that were referred as a "Blueprint Fragment" that was dropped from their targets whenever a Player scores a Kill, absorbing it into their bodies through both nice and gruesome ways, depending on which game the Player was based on.

**1 Feb 2020**

Infection spreads throughout Asia. The rate of survival depends on the popularity of video gaming within the specific locality, with Japan scoring the highest rate of survival.

Mechanism of assimilation analyzed-Player tissue seems to be able to take in foreign DNA, analyze it and repurpose it to suit the Player's needs whenever something that contains DNA was splattered onto it. The exact mechanism of DNA acquisition is diverse and not all physically explainable, which can range from Extremely subtle to Extremely visible, from Extremely clean to Extremely gruesome. Some of these "kill processes" can also assimilate mass, which may be used to Heal the Player, or be used for yet-to-be-known purposes.

Amps were developed, through genetic engineering and reprogramming of salvaged DNA, Amps allows abilities to be developed rationally and transformed into the Player users, somewhat eliminating the randomness that was inherent to the Assimilation process.

**15 Feb 2020**

Infection spreads to Indo-Pacific countries and Australia, generally leaving behind little survivors except for Singapore. Military-grade Amps were developed, but with the Old Tradition of Human Military, there is literally no survivors in any of the Military in the entire Infected Zone that were left to use it.

Black Markets for assimilating genes and cooking Amps emerges within the Infected Zone. Military-grade Amps are seen being sold in these markets.

**1 Mar 2020**

Infection lands in mainland Europe-which caused several major Superpower outbreaks all over Europe, except in Germany.

**5 Mar 2020**

The Royal Family was found committed Suicide in the U.K. Obviously knew they won't survive as the British Nobility is known notoriously for being highly picky for kinds of entertainment that are approved for them-video games obviously not one of their choices.

Most Brits themselves, however, have kinda survived, albeit as really, really, creepy versions of themselves as most of the bestsellers in video games in the British Isles were of the Horror genre.

**1 May 2020**

The Entire Globe was Infected. Someone in the U.S. wearing Alex Mercer's appearance have developed a code that lets Players assimilate things that were dead, and things that were never alive-a repurposed analyzer and gene synthesizer, as well as certain change in coding, lets the "kill process" to be unleashed onto lifeless objects-which apparently can be converted into Mass for certain styles of Assimilation. And the gene synthesizer lets the User to extract, convert and assimilate the Blueprint coding of non-living objects as Blueprint Fragments as well. Like the "Rockiness" of a rock, or the "Pushiness" of a jet engine.

Wikipedia was taken apart and thoroughly analyzed, which is quite necessary in the ever-expanding quest to include every non-living object into the list of objects that can be Assimilated by a player, if at a cost of energy/mass.

**9 May 2020**

Someone in a Green suit and shades killed and assimilated a large mutant that keeps popping out small mutants from an assimilated dumpster on it's back. Mass-users can now summon objects and living things-Blueprint Instances, assimilated or coded, apparently out of thin air as a cost of Mass. The function, SpawnActor, was quickly packed and commercialized as an Amp, and now pretty much everyone could stockpile stuff inside their bodies, pulling them out only when needed-the first Example of an Inventory have been born. Except for ones whose game does not let them use Mass. Which is pretty much screwed.

**24 May 2020**

The guy in Mercer costume gets killed by another bald, dark-skinned guy on top of the Empire State Building, and the Amp that allows Players to assimilate things that are not alive is now free of charge.

First example of Player murdering Player. Though nobody could stop it as all form of Law Enforcement have been turned into one of the Mutants wandering around in the Overworld due to their discipline-imposed prohibition on video games. Poor ones.

The ability to assimilate models and change appearance according to the assimilated models, which the Heller-Costumed guy literally pulled out of the skull of the Mercer-Costumed guy (Quite graphic for anyone who have played the games these two Player Characters came from), was apparently released for free by the first murderer in the entire new world (again as an Amp). Beauty Companies was one of the first customers of this new ability/Amp release-Female Players of the game Mass Effect Andromeda was extremely graceful for this.

**17 Jun 2020**

A group of green-skinned dwarves puts together an OSHA-unapproved spacecraft out of Mass and rode it straight onto the moon and back, despite the (obviously) lack of any kind of life support supplies in it's capsule.

Construction of the Kerbal Space Center have been started in Kennedy, Florida. Curiously, rockets that are obviously too large to fit inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) inside the Kerbal Space Center can still be seen being towed out of the building ignoring collision with the roof, placed onto the (obviously too small) launchpad, and launched into space. Landing spacecrafts did not seem to be burnt by atmospheric entry anyway-but certain small parts like antennae or solar panels can often be seen missing after each mission.

**4 Jul 2020**

Wacky creations could be seen orbiting the Earth all over the sky-and curiously, many can be seen successfully escaping the Earth's gravitational pull and inserting to a trajectory toward other planets at pinpoint accuracy. Players in Europe and Asia are very grateful for the free Blueprint Fragments that rains down their heads every time something reenters the atmosphere over their location.

**2 Oct 2020**

Someone in Sydney Australia, wearing a black suit and shades, came up with a brilliant idea about summoning the same Blueprint Class as himself. Australia ended up getting taken over by Agent Smiths.

Others (Black-hooded "people" with decayed skin and fallen-out teeth, and a like for shooting lightning out of their hands) responds by stockpiling thousands upon thousands of instances of Stormtroopers, Combat Droids and TIE Fighters, ready to blast the Agent Smiths away with (poorly aimed, but still effective considering the sheer numbers of both side of the cold war) blaster fire and ion cannonballs.

**1 Jan 2021**

After time warping to 10000000x for almost half an hour, the first Kerbal Mars mission have successfully landed onto the Prometheus Planum, and after Assimilating the Guidance System Blueprints from spaceships left inside a certain Easter Egg structure located on it, the mission crew directly navigated to earth within about 20 seconds, and magically appeared on London, just outside the Parliament Building.

**5 Jan 2021**

After locating a certain position on the "Galaxy Map" of the Prothean Spaceship Blueprint that allows instant transit to anywhere in the galaxy within 16 seconds (due to an annoying animation that always play that marks the full length of the transit) by just clicking on certain points on the Galaxy map, swarms of Players and Player Constructs funneled through the Charon Relay (While it was still closed!), and started to appear all over the Galaxy.

24 Jan 2021

Investigating the new, mysterious race that have appeared all over the Terminus Systems (apparently integrated to the local society quite smoothly on Omega, and have a taste for good liquor), Metualas Arterius stumbled upon a small fleet of what looked like heaps of trash held haphazardly together by what seems to be some kind of force field and strands of biomass, approaching an Inactive Mass Relay in the Omega system.

Thought they are trying to activate the Relay, Metualas Arterius pursued the fleet of "trash" and opened fire.


	2. Chapter 2

**Player Exploratory Vessel ESP-1**

"Looks like that these 'Turians' really aren't very good pitchers..."

A large, cartoon-looking dog with blue jacket, white gloves and beady shoes gave another swing at the glowing projectile that hurdled toward them, deflecting it back toward it's origin.

"And it looks like that they don't know how to play baseball either."

Turian Patrol Cruiser _The Eternal Justice_

"W.T.F."

"I think that the mass accelerator round just gets deflected."

The two Turian commanders watched in horror as the 16KG mass accelerator rounds, each carrying more than 2500 tons of TNT worth of energy, gets simply bounced back toward them from the "trash" they are trying to blow up. Without even a single flash to denote any form of impact.

The deflected round struck _The Eternal Justice_ with more than twice the speed it begun with, carrying energy more than a shot from a dreadnought, and with a single hit, The Eternal Justice lost it's Kinetic barriers, fire and explosions rocked the spacecraft.

"Fire another round!"

Another round is fired, and with an audible cheer saying "Home Run!", the round gained more than 9 times more energy than it begun with as it is again uneventfully bounced back, the blue trail now turned into a fiery orange with what looks like five pointed stars emanating from it like sparks that comes off a fireworks star. _The Eternal Justice _is now turned into a literal firework in the sky and pieces of flaming debris, none of the Turians that used to fly the ship have survived the explosion.

"That's called 'Return To The Sender!'"

The Nickelodeon MLB players currently inhabiting ESP-1 briefly cheered at the destruction of the attacking ship, before more and more of the Turian Patrol Vessels opened fire on them.

And every one of the ships that opened fire on them is now turned into fireworks in the clear, atmosphere-less sky.

"That's a good reference." Replied a figure that seems to be consists of entirely cuboids, and one that seems to defy laws of physics in the way his limbs moved in relation to the main body.

"That one big ship, let me use my Special Attack on it."

**Terminus Enforcement Patrol Dreadnought ****_The Unyielding Law_**

Metualas Arterius panicked as the engineering crew brought himself and his Ensign down to the deck where the Dreadnought's drive core is. Or was.

Instead of the usual glowing core of Element Zero being subjected to electrical energy, what used to be the chamber holding the Eezo Core is now completely filled with a spherical pile of red, cubic objects, with a sheet of gray in the middle and unknown script saying "TNT" written on it.

Suddenly, a glowing, red block of something appeared on top of the spherical pile, the red objects near it turned to a black color flashing white every one quarter of second.

4 seconds later.

"Ka-Boom."

The Minecraft Player aboard ESP-2 watched as the Dreadnought, which his helper on ESP-1 carefully kept alive while hitting all the shots that came from it away into the void-or into the other Turian Patrol ships that are by now have all turned into fireworks in space, slowly fell apart into multiple pieces with a satisfying chain of "banbanbanbanbanbanbang" from the TNT blocks he placed inside the biggest chamber in it using the 'SpawnActor' Blueprint function (with Reach hacked using Blueprint Editing/Amp Editing.) exploded in a chain action that tore the overly active, fragile auto-pitchers into multiple parts, before the Element Zero that used to be inside it's Drive core exploded in a massive flash that turned the Turian dreadnought into the final, biggest shell in the fireworks display that used to be half of the Citadel's entire presence in the Terminus Systems, which the players have been most active in due to the lawless, easy-to-befriend culture of the local aliens.

**Afterlife, Omega**

Aria T'Loak have been quite used to the presence of freaks and strange people from her last 300 years' rule of Omega. However, looking at the occasional member of this new race walking in front of her, or one of her several tens of thousands of surveillance cameras she had her employees set up on every corner on Omega, each one seems to differ widely in appearance and clothing, but all seems to have something that was similar, Aria T'Loak still can't help diving into her usual sea of thoughts.

It's been about a month since these "Players" were here. And in spite of their general peaceful, or even quite helpful appearance-no troubles made, lots of problems solved; She could feel the enormous amount of power coming from the seams of their optically-textured polygonal bodies, power so enormous that they could probably destroy even the Citadel if they thought of the need to do it-The battle near the Omega-3 Relay was the solid proof that these "Players", despite generally well-behaved, are nowhere soft.

There were no warning about their appearance: Usually new races are first found by the Citadel, either during early Spaceflight like the Turians, or outright Uplifted from pre-Spaceflight like the Krogans. These "Players", however, appeared outside of Mass Relays all over the Galaxy, apparently without any reason nor there were any evidence about the location of their homeworld, finding Citadel before the Citadel finds them.

They have been seen traveling through Dormant Relays-entire flotillas, of what she thought to be spacecrafts, escaping to nowhere through a dormant Relay as if it was just a normal traversal through an active one by Citadel races like her-but the Relay was left still Dormant and inactive after the transit event, just like before them traveled through. Their travel patterns ignore Relay Network geometry and topology, one ship seen leaving a system through a Mass Relay is always found arriving at the Primary Relay at it's presumed destination exactly 14.25 seconds later, even when there were no possible route directly through the Mass Relay Network to justify the short period of travel.

Their technology does not match anything that have been seen by the Citadel nor is homologous even through their own species, majority of them not even physically possible as found out during attempts of replication by either the Citadel or the Terminus Systems. Seriously, what good would a leather coat do any good in a gunfight when everyone wears armor on Omega knowing this fact? And the majority of them don't even need food, water nor air-the Life Support of Omega did not even register their presence on the space station, despite pretty much every one out of six Individuals she met anywhere on Omega was one of them. And they could be seen standing, moving and fighting in a hard vacuum without any form of protection anywhere on their "Bodies" at all. Or their spacecrafts have an atmosphere around it.

There seems to be a more interesting subspecies as well-something that resembled characters out of cartoons Aria watched during her childhood. And these had ridiculous powers as well-like pulling enormous hammers, anvils and other impossible-to-fit-on-their-"person" items apparently out of thin air, or the fact that most kinds of injuries, even ones that are outright fatal to other races, only deform their bodies momentarily with no ill effects afterward. Just like that inside the cartoons.

Nearly a thousand years old, and still a lot to learn. Aria thought to herself.

"Hey Aria, after our battle with the Turian Patrol Fleet near the Omega 3 Relay, I had an idea about destroying the citadel conventions that have hampered development in the entire galaxy including you and us. But we need your help-just a good connection to the Extranet, and we will soon be done."

**Council Chambers, Citadel Tower**

Councilor Tevos: "Did you just say that the entire Terminus Patrol was turned into fireworks in space by a baseball-Player?"

Councilor Sparatus: "Yes, we have photographic evidence that it was a single baseball-batter that destroyed the entire Patrol Fleet with deflected rounds of our own."

Councilor Tevos: "Then how do you explain the spontaneous detonation of _The Unyielding Law _which haven't been hit during the entire battle even once?"

Councilor Sparatus's Omni Tool suddenly blacked out, before every screen inside the Council Chamber started to display static-and a female, white-clothed figure started to crawl out from the holographic screen of Councilor Sparatus's Omni Tool, which refuses to be turned off nomatter how the panicked three members of the Citadel Council tried.

"I HAVE BEEN HAVING A DISGUST FOR YOU FOR A LONG TIME."

"BE MY FOOD. I WILL GUARANTEE YOU TO HAVE A GOOD LIFE IN MY BELLY."

Councilor Valern: "Guar-"

Before a deathly-pale, clawed hand holds onto his malnourished, thin neck, choking him. The hand gripped even harder, until the Salarian suddenly shattered into thousands of shimmering pieces and what seems like depictions of a form of program and is absorbed into the white-clothed, feminine looking owner of the hand, who have completely left the static-filled screen by now.

Other figures, similar to the first, left the screens in the Council Chambers, and both the Asari and the Turian Councilor are soon met with their fate of absorption-and as soon as the last living alien within the council chamber was shattered and absorbed by the figures by their bare hand, the ones that haven't reached anyone within the Council Chambers stopped and left through the same screens they came from, while the one that have crushed and absorbed the contents of the Council Chambers disappeared into clouds of static, before reappearing as perfect copies of the Councilors, the Guards that guarded this place, the Keeper that worked on one of the terminals, the two unlucky visitors that got absorbed during the attack, and everyone that used to inhibit the Council Chamber.

Disguised Asari Councilor: "We had consensus."

Disguised Turian Councilor: "Due to the enormous defeat in the attempt of enforcing the Citadel Conventions, we have agreed with the new species, known as the 'Players', to completely abandon the Citadel Conventions."

Disguised Asari Councilor: "To put an Amnesty on all forms of acts that were previously, and wrongly, persecuted under the Conventions, and we plea to never enforce such rules again-"

Disguised Salarian Councilor: "Not only on the Players, but on everyone in both citadel space and in the entire Galaxy."

Disguised Asari Councilor: "And to show that we are in fact a real democracy, every race, major or minor, would receive a seat in the Council, with no more distinction, or discrimination, of major or minor races anymore."

Disguised Salarian Councilor: "And let a new age of exploration and discovery begin."

**Aria T'Loak, Omega**

"And finally, the Terminus Systems are now legalized and free from the looming war with the Citadel any more."

"Cheers!"


End file.
